2009-01-22

New phone features 'baffle users'

The complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry, research suggests.
This is the kind of information that should make any wannabe iPhone competitor pause. And a good rebuke to those who chide Apple for not supporting useless features such as MMS. Why are they useless? Because they fail often enough to frustrate users. In fact, a few years ago my brother and I tried to set it up to exchange camera phone pictures, and couldn't get the damn thing to work. We're both sysadmins, using Nokia phones, on the same damn network, using the operator's own recommended setup. Didn't work, and there was absolutely no way to know what was wrong. They might have fixed the thing by now but I won't waste any time on it.

My Nokia phone is full of such bullet point features. It has MMS, but it can also play music. Funny thing, that music player. It can't fast forward. Oh sure, there is a "fast forward" button, and it does go forward, but not fast by any stretch of the imagination. Say you're listening to a podcast. 10 minutes in, you have to make a phone call. You have to exit the music player, and when you come back ... the player is back at the beginning. Want to fast forward 10 minutes? That's gonna take you 5 minutes with the non-fast fast forward button. Useless. I hear newer Nokia phones have a much better music player; good for them. The thing is, they advertised a music player in that phone's ads, and it was unusable. It worked, but was unusable.

2009-01-13

Chicago's Transport Authority fails at the internet

Norwegians are either utterly fascinated with the comings and goings of CTA buses, or there just aren't enough recreational activities in the land of fiords and Viking ships. The CTA Bus Tracker Web site has received 15,395 visits since last year from people in Norway or whose computers or personal wireless devices were registered in that Scandinavian kingdom.
It took me about 3 µs to think of Opera Mini, which is a light-weight mobile phone web browser. Most of the HTML processing is actually done on servers at Opera's HQ ... in Norway.